The woman who says she was sexually assaulted by Lt. Gov. Justin Fairfax 14 years ago hinted to U.S. Rep. Robert C. “Bobby” Scott of the allegation last year.

An aide to the Democratic congressman said Scott and Fairfax’s accuser, Vanessa Tyson, were friends for years, and that she first approached him about her allegation of sexual assault last year while The Washington Post was investigating it.

Scott’s earlier knowledge of the accusation was first reported by ABC News.

In a lengthy public statement released Wednesday, Tyson provides a detailed account of a 2004 encounter with Fairfax, then working as a campaign staffer at the Democratic National Convention in Boston.

“What began as consensual kissing quickly turned into a sexual assault,” Tyson, a professor at Scripps College in Claremont, Calif., said in the statement released through her Washington law firm, Katz, Marshall & Banks. The firm also represented Christine Blasey Ford, who accused U.S. Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh of sexually assaulting her.

In recounting the 2004 encounter, Tyson described a forceful act in which Fairfax held down her head with his hand to perform oral sex on him inside a hotel room. She went to The Post about the allegation in December 2017, after Fairfax had won his lieutenant governor election.

“I cannot believe, given my obvious distress, that Mr. Fairfax thought this forced sexual act was consensual,” she said in the statement.

The congressional aide, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said Tyson didn’t personally share any of the details of her allegation against Fairfax — Scott only learned limited information about it through Post reporters, who contacted him a year ago at Tyson’s request.

Scott — a Newport News congressman who has represented the Hampton Roads area for decades — said he didn’t learn the full scope of the allegation until Tyson released her statement Wednesday.

“Allegations of sexual assault need to be taken seriously,” he said in a statement. “I have known Professor Tyson for approximately a decade and she is a friend. She deserves the opportunity to have her story heard.”

In her statement, Tyson said she didn’t speak about the assault for years and suppressed her memories of it. She began telling close friends about it two years ago when she saw a photo of Fairfax as he ran for lieutenant governor.

Fairfax, a Democrat, has denied the accusation, saying the sexual encounter was 100 percent consensual. He called the allegations “surprising and hurtful” but added, “I also recognize that no one makes charges of this kind lightly, and I take it and this situation very seriously.”

Scott has called on Democratic Gov. Ralph Northam to resign after a racist photo showing a person dressed in blackface and a person dressed in Ku Klux Klan robes appears next to his 1984 Eastern Virginia Medical School yearbook.

Northam admitted he was one of the people in the photo on Friday, but recanted his admission Saturday during a press conference, when he said he’d never seen the photo and never dressed up in KKK robes or blackface.

Scott hasn’t publicly taken a position on whether Attorney General Mark Herring should resign after the Democrat also confessed Wednesday to wearing blackface when he dressed up as a black rapper as a 19-year-old at the University of Virginia.